Monthly Archives: December 2003

A small bottle, one of the artifacts sent back to History San Jose for display (85-31/13-66).

It’s good to be back in lab after a long summer away. We have been wrapping up things from last year as well as preparing for another archaeological lab methodology class this coming winter. We finished the project progress report for 2002-2003, which is an overview of the current condition of the collections as well as preleminary research results. The report can be downloaded from this site in .pdf form here.

A marble (85-31/33-97), also sent to History San Jose for display.

This year, two new research assistants join Professor Voss on the project: Stanford archaeology graduate students Liz Clevenger and Bryn Williams. Last month, boxes from 86-36 (a different area of the site from 85-31) were transferred from History San Jose to the lab at Stanford. We are now in the process of sorting the boxes by material type and preparing the collection for analysis during the lab methods class. Earlier this fall, we also returned some 85-31 artifacts to history San Jose for use in a display.

As was the case last year with 85-31, there are a number of artifacts in the 86-36 collection that have us totally mystified! One of them is pictured at right (86-36/17-161 and 86-36/5-567). We found these pieces of ceramic already bagged together as we were sorting through the new collection, although they come from two different features in the site (feature 5 and feature 17)! Our guesses as to the nature of this artifact ranged from soap dish to food steamer, but as of now we don’t have a positive identification. Stay tuned to find out if we figure out what exactly this artifact is during the coming year.